As for the new Cisco Media Hub let's not forget that this is a networking Company that is moving into the storage market that is currently owned by the likes of Seagate, Western Digital and bottom end players like LaCie. So how does the new Cisco offering stack up?

As I see it the new Cisco Media Hub is a bit like the Apple iPhone and it could well have the same effect on the storage market as the Apple iPhone did on the mobile communication market for two reasons ease of use and simple smart software.

It is so easy to install that out of the box, the device took only 2 minutes to mount the software, find the device and start copying content.

Within seconds the media hub's own unique software had loaded to the screen of my PC and was prompting me to search for content.  All I had to do was connect an Ethernet cable to my office network, turn it on, and voila! we were into the land of smart storage management.

And because the drive supports UPnP and works well with Windows, Apple iTunes, the Mac and even Linux, you can expect to see the drive on your network without installing a driver or fussing with an IP address.
Only when you do want to manage the advanced features will you need the included setup CD or to access the drive's IP.
After going through the key process of establishing device names and passwords I was very quickly in content management mode.

While other storage vendors expect you to be a certified Microsoft expert to simply load the device, Cisco has gone out of its way to make life easy by delivering a piece of software that seriously questions the need for Microsoft's own Media Centre software.

Most storage systems do not have content management software. They do have backup software which after 30 days they expect you to pay for. What they expect you to do is use a third party piece of software to manage the content and when you are ready to store or access the content find the drive on you network.

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